The motion picture association has already collected well over $200,000,000 in fines (via threats of lawsuits) from pirated movie uploaders AND downloaders. A friend of mine is a senior manager in security at Comcast. He showed me the process of 'sniffing' out the location of downloaders without ever filing a lawsuit. In many cases the studios can get your general location. The can easily get the city you live in and in many cases the block cluster address which gets them within a few streets of your home. Strangely AT&T Uverse is the hardest to get info from not counting the slow dish services or dialup systems which nobody uses to download movie files.
Even the porn industry has issued over 70,000 threatening letters and collected over $6,500,000 from downloaders. Fortunately the court system has not been friendly to the thug like behavior of the porn lawyers.
The reason the studios slowed down their lawsuits is because it was generating bad publicity for the studios however twisted that reasoning seems. Any studio can enter a legal action in federal court and get an injunction forcing an internet ISP to divulge the user name and address associated with an specific IP at a specific time. Read your terms of service. Compliance with court orders is in every contract ISP's offer. The reason it isn't done more is that these injunctions are costly for studios due to legal costs and while no one has ever successfully defended themselves against one of these suits the studios don't always collect. You may recall the famous case where a woman was asked to pay something like $5,000 for illegally downloading. She went to court twice. At the end of the second court case she owed over $2,000,000. She claims she has paid nothing yet the studios, law firm and even her lawyers have placed leans on her property.
The real issue is the twisted logic people here are employing to justify their actions. I run a $7 million dollar recording studio and video production facility. I see the hundreds or thousands of hours and thousands of dollars artists put into their music and video projects. Here is the hard truth: they own it and you don't! Their works are protected by international laws. Lets say you go to work tomorrow and your boss says he isn't going to pay you for your time and effort. He is going to pirate your employment. You wouldn't like it nor would you not file a legal action against him. Yet you make bizarre rationalizations why taking what belongs to others is OK. That is just sick, sick, sick. Then again we live in a society that believes that things should be given to them rather than earned. Thus to them pirating makes sense. That is of course to any rational person just mentally ill thinking.
Many years ago I worked in sales for the Crazy Eddie company. They decided they weren't going to pay the sales staff for the commissions on sales. They were stealing our extra effort to make each sale. We sued and won.
The argument that you can't return the item is true but bogus in practice. Nearly every company that sells music and movie media offers samples to determine if you like it or not. If you still don't like it you can always sell it on EBAY but that is hampered if people are getting the same songs and movies for free illegally. These things come back to bite you in the arse.
The bottom line is: the artist owns their work and you don't. Libraries only allow you to copy portions of books and then only a reference copy for academic use. You may not redistribute such copies to friends and family. That's the law.
I repeat: the artist owns their work and you don't. They are allowed to distribute it as they see fit and have the legal right of first publication.
I spent some $143,000 of my own money to release a CD in 2002 by an artist that I believed in. The critics loved it. Within a week it was on usenet sites. We actually received e-mail praising the artist from people who stole her music asking when she was releasing another CD. That second CD never arrived and she is teaching singing in a California school system. I still have a couple hundred copies of the CD's in storage. How many sales did we lose from illegal downloads. That is unknown. What she needed was momentum for her career and that never happened. As a published author of eleven books I can say that all eleven are available on usenet. How much have I lost?
You don't have to know someone to know someone.
reply
share
ixusillwrath
9 years ago
Sucks for you that you wasted 143,000 dollars on something that can be reproduced at no cost whatsoever and constitutes no crime in doing so.
For the 7 millionth time, filesharing is 100% legal. It's the online equivalent of burning a copy of a CD for a friend; a completely legal thing to do.
Your 200 million dollars in fines is an absolute farce. Your money wasn't stolen, it was WASTED because you ineptly jumped into a market that the production end holds absolutely no control over the consumer end.
Time for you and all your greed apologists to think of some other way of extracting peoples' cash. Scaring people on forum posts won't work.
reply
share
Randm1
8 years ago
This is a really late response, but I was waiting for someone to say the obvious. That file sharing is literally the same as making mixed CD's for your friends. Remember when cassettes were the only thing that people used? So people would tape songs off the radio onto cassette tapes and then make mix tapes and given them to their friends. Does this make everyone who made mix tapes thieves? I just wanted to say I'm glad you brought that up. (even though its like a year later lol)
Rand
4 8 15 16 23 42
reply
share
nrkist2424
8 years ago
You keep saying artists own their work...but you keep coming back to how much money you lost investing in some artist. I thought the artist owned it?
You are hilarious. That block of text is intended to be an ironic scathing of the recording label industry, right?
'What she needed was momentum for her career, and that never happened.'
Why did she NEED all this momentum for her 'career'. You sound toxic.
reply
share